The same consideration that made procedure by resolution unadvisable told with equal force within the cabinet. Examination into the feasibility of some sort of plan was most rapidly brought to a head by the test of a particular plan. It is a mere fable of faction that a cast iron policy was arbitrarily imposed upon the cabinet; as matter of fact, the plan originally propounded did undergo large and radical modifications.
The policy as a whole shaped itself in two measures. First, a scheme for creating a legislative body, and defining its powers; second, a scheme for opening the way to a settlement of the land question, in discharge of an obligation of honour and policy, imposed upon this country by its active share in all the mischiefs that the Irish land system had produced. The introduction of a plan for dealing with the land was not very popular even among ministers, but it was pressed by Lord Spencer and the Irish secretary, on the double ground that the land was too burning a question to be left where it then stood, and next that it was unfair to a new and untried legislature in Ireland to find itself confronted by such a question on the very threshold.
The plan was opened by Mr. Gladstone in cabinet on [pg 302] March 13th, and Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Trevelyan at once wished to resign. He remonstrated in a vigorous correspondence. “I have seen many and many a resignation,” he said, “but never one based upon the intentions, nay the immature intentions, of the prime minister, and on a pure intuition of what may happen. Bricks and rafters are prepared for a house, but are not themselves a house.” The evil hour was postponed, but not for long. The Cabinet met again a few days later (March 26) and things came to a sharp issue. The question was raised in a sufficiently definite form by the proposition from the prime minister for the establishment of a statutory body sitting in Dublin with legislative powers. No difficulty was made about the bare proposition itself. Every one seemed to go as far as that. It needed to be tested, and tests were at once forthcoming. Mr. Trevelyan could not assent to the control of the immediate machinery of law and order being withdrawn from direct British authority, among other reasons because it was this proposal that created the necessity for buying out the Irish landlords, which he regarded as raising a problem absolutely insoluble.[193] Mr. Chamberlain raised four points. He objected to the cesser of Irish representation; he could not consent to the grant of full rights of taxation to Ireland; he resisted the surrender of the appointment of judges and magistrates; and he argued strongly against proceeding by enumeration of the things that an Irish government might not do, instead of by a specific delegation of the things that it might do.[194] That these four objections were not in themselves incapable of accommodation was shown by subsequent events. The second was very speedily, and the first was ultimately allowed, while the fourth was held by good authority to be little more than a question of drafting. Even the third was not a point either way on which to break up a government, destroy a policy, and split a party. But everybody who is acquainted with either the great or the small conflicts of human history, knows how little the mere terms of a principle or of an objection are to be trusted as a clue either to its practical significance, or [pg 303]
Important Resignations
to the design with which it is in reality advanced. The design here under all the four heads of objection, was the dwarfing of the legislative body, the cramping and constriction of its organs, its reduction to something which the Irish could not have even pretended to accept, and which they would have been no better than fools if they had ever attempted to work.
Some supposed then, and Mr. Chamberlain has said since, that when he entered the cabinet room on this memorable occasion, he intended to be conciliatory. Witnesses of the scene thought that the prime minister made little attempt in that direction. Yet where two men of clear mind and firm will mean two essentially different things under the same name, whether autonomy or anything else, and each intends to stand by his own interpretation, it is childish to suppose that arts of deportment will smother or attenuate fundamental divergence, or make people who are quite aware how vitally they differ, pretend that they entirely agree. Mr. Gladstone knew the giant burden that he had taken up, and when he went to the cabinet of March 26, his mind was no doubt fixed that success, so hazardous at best, would be hopeless in face of personal antagonisms and bitterly divided counsels. This, in his view, and in his own phrase, was one of the “great imperial occasions” that call for imperial resolves. The two ministers accordingly resigned.
Besides these two important secessions, some ministers out of the cabinet resigned, but they were of the whig complexion.[195] The new prospect of the whig schism extending into the camp of the extreme radicals created natural alarm but hardly produced a panic. So deep were the roots of party, so immense the authority of a veteran leader. It used to be said of the administration of 1880, that the world would never really know Mr. Gladstone's strength in parliament and the country, until every one of his colleagues [pg 304] had in turn abandoned him to his own resources. Certainly the secessions of the end of March 1886 left him undaunted. Every consideration of duty and of policy bound him to persevere. He felt, justly enough, that a minister who had once deliberately invited his party and the people of the three kingdoms to follow him on so arduous and bold a march as this, had no right on any common plea to turn back until he had exhausted every available device to “bring the army of the faithful through.”
III
From the first the Irish leader was in free and constant communication with the chief secretary. Proposals were once or twice made, not I think at Mr. Parnell's desire, for conversations to be held between Mr. Gladstone and himself, but they were always discouraged by Mr. Gladstone, who was never fond of direct personal contentions, or conversations when the purpose could be as well served otherwise, and he had a horror of what he called multiplying channels of communication. “For the moment,” he replied, “I think we may look to Mr. M. alone, and rely on all he says for accuracy as well as fidelity. I have been hard at work, and to-day I mean to have a further and full talk with Mr. M., who will probably soon after wish for some renewed conversation with Mr. Parnell.” Mr. Parnell showed himself acute, frank, patient, closely attentive, and possessed of striking though not rapid insight. He never slurred over difficulties, nor tried to pretend that rough was smooth. On the other hand, he had nothing in common with that desperate species of counsellor, who takes all the small points, and raises objections instead of helping to contrive expedients. He measured the ground with a slow and careful eye, and fixed tenaciously on the thing that was essential at the moment. Of constructive faculty he never showed a trace. He was a man of temperament, of will, of authority, of power; not of ideas or ideals, or knowledge, or political maxims, or even of the practical reason in any of its higher senses, as Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson had practical reason. But he knew what he wanted.
Mr. Parnell